The Hippodrome casino: titanic opulence in the midst of recession

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/13/hippodrome-casino-titanic-opulence-recession

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In the eaves of the Hippodrome, whence the midgets once dangled and the one-legged cyclist strung his trapeze, there are now tables and tables of gambler's baize. The gaming systems always look so erudite from a distance, until you remember the simplicity. Just choose a thing, put money on it, wham, your money has gone, choose again. I'd forgotten how exciting it was.

In the basement where once were watertanks for the elephants, there is more gambling – you sit at a machine and play touch-screen roulette against an automated table in the corner. It looked more joyless and functional than the tables upstairs, but only because I wasn't playing.

There is table gambling and machine gambling, transaction gambling and premium gambling. And in between, a cabaret, a smoking terrace, some fish fingers made of lobster for £19: I was about to say that the Hippodrome has come a long way since its turn-of-the-last-century origins, but actually I'd say it was much closer to the way it was in 1900, now, than it was last time I saw it in 1990, a strobe-lit sweatbox with a false ceiling.

Vast, ugly but effective chandeliers now fill the atrium, the atmosphere is alive with the exhilaration of addictive personalities, and everywhere you look, there's something to see.

"It feels like the Titanic," said Christian, who used to be an epic gambler but is no longer.

"Do you mean mindless opulence, lavished upon people who are oblivious to impending disaster?"

"No, I just mean there are lots of really big rooms."

A double-dip recession seems a rum time to open a delinquents' playground, but Simon Thomas, who co-owns it with his father, Jimmy, disagrees: "The recession has worked very well for us. The building was better because contractors are hungry; the competing casinos weren't doing well, so getting staff was easier; and London is not in recession. London is heaving."

Up to 240,000 people walk past the door every week. 40 million a year pass underneath it on the tube. It's like what they say about rats. You're never more than a few feet from a person who's gone past the Hippodrome.

The thing that will make it work, if it does, won't be the footfall so much as the fact that all it's a new kind of casino. Even though the curious rules of the 1968 Gambling Act were largely scotched by the last government, nobody has yet torn up the old image of a casino that those rules created.

It used to be a niche, intimidating experience – you had to be a member, and not an instant one, either, so you couldn't make an ad hoc decision; you couldn't drink on the gambling floor (in Napoleon's, you used to have to sit in a sort of glass box, all in a line, watching the tables, drinking in silence); they couldn't advertise, even on the front of the building, so they tended to be in basements.

It was a hole-in-the-corner affair, and this … if you were asked to conjure the very opposite of a hole in a corner, this is what you would build.

As much as I hate to be vulgar, I had to ask: how much money is Thomas expecting people to drop when they come in here?

"They can spend anything from zero to hundreds of pounds. It's not for me to tell people how much to spend. They might just want to come in for a drink." Proprietors have to say that, don't they? But one of his other ventures is that giant bingo hall in Cricklewood, so he has form in providing an avenue for people to waste money in not necessarily huge amounts.

The interiors are not Vegas-ey; it's rather muted, and there's a look of studied reassurance that puts me in mind of an airport lounge. However, it doesn't lack personality. There's a lot of original plasterwork and the walls are discreetly papered with the flyers from the building's entertainment history.

Diana Miller, who was in the chorus of Razzle Dazzle here in the early 1970s, peels back a curtain and points to a faded picture of feather-clad dancers descending stairs. "There I am, second from the back."

The peculiar economics of the casino – where people spend so much on a cheap thing that all kinds of expensive things can be thrown in for free – have yielded a cabaret: this week, Tony Christie. He has a nine-strong backing band, and a proper silver-screen voice, and it's all so impressive that it's a bit surreal.

"Back in 1971," he begins, "I had a record at No 2 in the charts. And my wife was two weeks overdue, and she said: 'I'm not having this baby until you go to number 1.' It didn't. But she had the baby anyway." You don't get chat like that off Snow Patrol.

It's open 24 hours a day, every day except Christmas. It is rumoured to have cost £40m. It's a sort of magnetic lunacy; I can't see it failing. It's too big to fail.